The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Microsoft Page-Turning Patent Could Spell Trouble For Apple’s iBooks
- Skype’s Innermost Security Layers Claimed To Be Reverse-Engineered
- Our Judges For The TechCrunch Europe Summer Pitch Battle
- U.S. Venture Capital Fundraising Up 13 Percent In First Half Of 2010 To $7.5B
- German Court Sets Legal Parameters For People Search
- Chinese Online Game Developer The9 Invests In OpenFeint Maker Aurora Feint
- We Need More Opinion In News, Not Less
- The Social Network: Second Trailer For The Facebook Movie Hits The Web
- It’s Time For Microsoft’s Second Inception
- Orkut About To Fall To Facebook In India
- Coveroo Raises $2.3 Million For Custom-Engraved Mobile Cases
- Comparison Shopping Site NexTag Acquires Product Review Engine Wize
- Breaking: Facebook To Enter Into Partnership With Friendster Buyer MOL Global
- TechCrunch TV: Keen On… Connectivity, with Clay Shirky and Charlene Li
- OMG/JK Episode 2: Next of Kin
- Techcrunch TV: Investor Jeff Clavier, CloudCrowd CEO Debate Apple’s China Strategy, Twitter’s Earlybird
- YouTube ‘Leanback’ Launches, Takes Aim At Your Television Set
- Foursquare Extending The Physical Reach Of Offers And Hints At Hardware Integration
- Brand Thunder Rolls Out Personas Interactive Extension For Firefox
- Tesla Stock Idling 7 Percent Below IPO Price
- Foursquare Is Five Times Larger Than Gowalla And Growing 75 Percent Faster Every Day
- With Interest At A Frenzy, Bing Attaches Itself To LeBron’s Hip
- Twitter + Vuvuzela. What More Do You Need?
- YouTube Mobile Goes HTML5, Video Quality Beats Native Apps Hands Down
- Location Data Gets An Important New Layer: The Alcohol Layer
| Microsoft Page-Turning Patent Could Spell Trouble For Apple’s iBooks Posted: 08 Jul 2010 08:07 AM PDT
The patent application, which was filed in 2009, appears to have been filed with Microsoft’s Courier touch-based tablet in mind. But unfortunately, that project was tabled a few months ago. Essentially, Microsoft is trying to patent making a virtual page turn exactly like a real page. Here’s an excerpt from the application:
While Microsoft applied last year, it seems that the patent has not actually been awarded to the company yet. But the tablet is dead, so it’s unclear what the benefit would be to Microsoft at this point (besides maybe engaging in a bit of legal patent fun with Apple). But the action that is being patented seems fairly obvious, which may prevent the patent from being awarded. After all, it is nothing more than an animation of a page being turned, an “invention” which goes back to the days of Guttenberg.      
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| Skype’s Innermost Security Layers Claimed To Be Reverse-Engineered Posted: 08 Jul 2010 07:17 AM PDT Internet telephony giant Skype may well have a significant security issue on its hands, TechCrunch has learned. Someone claims to have reverse-engineered the proprietary encryption protocols Skype has put in place to prevent developers from building their own Skype desktop clients or Web-based services based on the company’s in-house technology. If this checks out, this basically means the walls of Skype’s pretty garden have been abruptly hauled down, something the company was hoping to do on its own, albeit slowly, by rolling out public APIs in the future. The full extent of what a possible breach of this system could entail is unclear, but worst case, malicious hackers could gain insights from the reverse-engineered procedures and learn how to exploit it. To be clear: there’s no reason for panic until the implications become obvious. Either way, Skype posits there is no security issue at all, but the jury is still out on that. Let’s start with the beginning. The person who claims to have pulled of this feat – he writes under the moniker Sean O’Neil, which is almost certainly a pseudonym – which has apparently been tried for the past 10 years to no avail, published a blog post with a title that leaves little to the imagination: “Skype’s Biggest Secret Revealed”. The post was submitted to Reddit not long after publication, but for whatever reason the blog (enrupt.com) is no longer accessible now, although you can still get to the cached version of the article in question (see below). Here are the key parts of the blog post (I removed the link to the ciphers, but they shouldn’t be too hard to find, as the information is already spreading in the places these things tend to spread, and quickly at that):
I’m no security expert, let alone an experienced coder, so it’s hard for me to assess the significance of the release of the algorithm. Co-Founder & CEO at Scio Security Dug Song, however, is convinced this is regarded as a major breakthrough in hacker circles, according to his tweets. Industry blog The H Security, meanwhile, cautiously warns that the publication of the code does “not mean that Skype’s encryption can be considered ‘cracked’ “. For what it’s worth, Sean O’Neil (again, probably not his real name) says this code has been in his possession for a long time, and that some of it was leaked a couple of months ago – leading to usage of it by hackers with malicious intent. He also says he reported the leak to Skype, but writes that he was “abused by Skype administration”, whatever that means.
The blog post is signed with ‘Skype Reverse Engineering Team’, and ends with an open invitation to the next Chaos Communication Congress (27C3) in Berlin, to “hear all the juicy details on how to use this function to decrypt Skype traffic”. Skype is quite open about being aware that this code is out in the open, but seems overly confident that it poses no security risk of any kind. This is the statement I was provided with:
I’ll reiterate once more that I’m not a security expert, but I’m sure the significance of the code’s release will be actively discussed by people who are in the coming days. Any security wizards who’d like to weigh in on this in the comment section?      
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| Our Judges For The TechCrunch Europe Summer Pitch Battle Posted: 08 Jul 2010 07:16 AM PDT  As we're postponing The Europas Awards for tech companies in Europe until after the Summer (sign up here to get news on that) we're instead holding an event we're calling "TechCrunch Summer Pitch Battle". It is on July 14 in London, 6.30pm at the new co-working space for startups, TechHub, Ground Floor, 76-80 City Rd, right by Old Street tube station. Here's how it will work:
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| U.S. Venture Capital Fundraising Up 13 Percent In First Half Of 2010 To $7.5B Posted: 08 Jul 2010 06:04 AM PDT
Including a U.S. private equity shops, which includes venture funds, 198 funds raised $45.1 billion during the first half, down 26% from the same period in 2009. Buyout funds raised saw the biggest drop in money raised, finding $21 billion across 74 funds, down 35% from $32.4 billion raised by 75 funds a year ago, as limited partners' interest in mega funds — those targeting $6 billion and up — waned. But venture funding remained strong, says Dow Jones. Multi-stage funds saw the strongest fundraising for the time periods with Twenty multi-stage funds raising a total of $4 billion, a 15% increase from the $3.4 billion invested in 24 multi-stage funds during the same period last year. Capital raised by early-stage funds jumped 19% as 49 funds attracted $3 billion in the first half of the year. Later-stage funds, which have generally been known for raising less than multi-stage or eary-stage funds, locked in $500 million for three funds, down 21% from the year-earlier period. The venture industry's biggest close came from Sequoia Capital's Sequoia China Foreign Currency Fund III fund which secured $1 billion its early-stage fund during the first half of the year.      
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| German Court Sets Legal Parameters For People Search Posted: 08 Jul 2010 06:03 AM PDT  In a small Hamburg court room, something special has happened - at least when it comes to the legal parameters of people search applications on the web. The ligitator, a young woman, sued 123people. Specifically its German web property 123people.de, which has recently been sold to Pages Jaunes Groupe, for showing a photo of herself on its landing page. The court, however, declared the defendant "not guilty"(in German). To our knowledge this has been the first ruling from a higher court in Europe that puts often critized people search engines out of their, supposedly, legal grey area. 
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| Chinese Online Game Developer The9 Invests In OpenFeint Maker Aurora Feint Posted: 08 Jul 2010 05:21 AM PDT The9, a Chinese online game developer, has made an undisclosed minority equity investment in Aurora Feint, the company behind OpenFeint, a social gaming network for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. The news comes a couple of months after The9 announced that it had acquired a majority interest in US-based Red 5 Studios for a total of approx. $20 million. Aurora Feint had previously raised a multimillion-dollar round of funding from DeNA, the largest Japanese operator of mobile social networks and virtual goods platforms. Burlingame, CA-based Aurora Feint develops mobile games and operates OpenFeint, a mobile social platform and application for smartphones that includes a set of online game services such as leaderboards and achievements running in a cloud-based Web environment. OpenFeint’s developer SDK is a toolkit that can be integrated into any iPhone based game. OpenFeint also recently announced OpenFeint X, a virtual goods management system that enables developers to build free-to-play social games for mobile phones. The company claims over 28 million active users and 2,200 games, which it says makes OpenFeint the standard for social gaming on Apple devices. The9 Chairman and CEO commented on the acquisition, “We are confident of the prospect for this mobile platform and believe it will play an important role in the future development of global mobile internet. The investment in Aurora Feint is an important step of The9′s establishment of a mobile gaming platform and is also an integral part of our global strategy.”      
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| We Need More Opinion In News, Not Less Posted: 08 Jul 2010 03:24 AM PDT
I think journalists should have the right to express their opinions on the topics they cover. More importantly, I think readers have a right to know what those opinions are. Frankly, I’d like to know sooner rather than later just how insane some of these people at CNN and Fox News are. To stop them from giving me that information is just another way to lie to me. A couple of years ago I was attending a dinner in New York, sitting next to a very well known journalist covering big national news, particularly political news. He’d been in the business a long time – since the early 70s – and we had a fascinating conversation about news gathering and creation, and how technology is changing the industry. At one point I asked him offhand what he thought of President Bush as a leader. He got very serious and told me he wouldn’t comment. Curious, I asked him what political party he supported. Again, he wouldn’t respond. He said it was important for him to keep that a secret so that it would not be seen as a bias in his coverage. Oh, that sparked a conversation. He did admit that he did support some politicians and not others and that he tended to vote for a single political party. He just wouldn’t state any names. And this is where I became and remain seriously confused. As a trained journalist he saw his job as reporting the news in a balanced and unbiased way. To tell me, or anyone, his political leanings could make people see his content differently, he said. My point to him was that it was necessary for people to know his political biases in order to understand his content in context. I believe it is quite impossible to not bake your bias into your content. He disagreed and said that the core of his training was to do just that. Of course, his political bias was fairly evident to me, he clearly hated Bush with a passion. But I couldn’t make him say it. But he’s wrong. An added adjective here, an added paragraph there, just the right quote from a source and voilà, you’ve got yourself an opinion piece masked as a straight up unbiased piece of reporting. I’ve witnessed this first hand more times than I can remember, which is why I don’t tend to do interviews with journalists I don’t know and trust. One slip of the tongue and that’s all they focus on, even if it’s out of context. There’s little care for the overall message, just the sound bites that give the journalist the hook they need. See this article from last year where I argue that Process Journalism isn’t just not a bad thing, it’s the proper way to develop stories. I say near the end
Think it’s crazy to say that top journalists go out and hunt down the quotes they need to tell the story they want to tell? Well Tim O’Reilly says it happened this week:
We take a lot of criticism at TechCrunch for writing stories that are clearly biased. That’s despite the fact that we tend to state our bias right up front, sometimes in the damn title. That’s not journalism, people say. Well, that’s fine with me. But what you can’t accuse us of is being dishonest to our readers. We call things like we see them. We never fudge facts or make things up. We don’t go out and manufacture quotes to support the story we want to write, we just write the story. And other people can write different stories with different opinions. And you, the reader, can go read all of them and then maybe write your own blog post with a whole new opinion. Everyone has a printing press these days, and ink is free. That has changed the world, and journalism needs to change with it. The fact is it’s impossible for a human being to write something that isn’t subjective. We aren’t robots, we’re human. At the moment you even chose the topic of your content you’ve made a subjective choice to spend time on that instead of something else. And everything flows from there. Read that entire Microsoft post that Tim O’Reilly links to carefully and you’ll see the bias screaming out from the page. Until I was actually creating news this wasn’t so obvious to me. Now I can read any news piece and tell you the subtle or not so subtle bias of the author in a heartbeat. All this bullshit about objectivity in journalism is just a trick journalists use to try to gain credibility, and the public eats it up. I’ve got a whole new post, or maybe even a book, to write about why I think that is. Here’s hoping we’ll start to get those deep, dark opinions out in the open for everyone to see.      
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| The Social Network: Second Trailer For The Facebook Movie Hits The Web Posted: 08 Jul 2010 03:22 AM PDT  A couple of weeks ago, the first trailer for the upcoming Facebook movie, The Social Network, hit the Web. Well lo and behold, a couple of hours ago the second trailer was released (embedded below). Remember, you saw it here first ;) The apocalyptic score remains, and the audio cuts from the movie you hear in the teaser are largely the same as in the first trailer, but this time conversations are played out like a chronological run-down of a Facebook news feed.
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| It’s Time For Microsoft’s Second Inception Posted: 08 Jul 2010 01:26 AM PDT
“An idea can transform the world and re-write all the rules. Which is why I have to steal it,” Cobb teases at one point in the trailer. For whatever reason, the film and that premise got me thinking about Microsoft. More specifically, about some of the recent stories about yet more internal struggles at the company and the complete and utter failure of the Kin. It seems to me that Microsoft created one of these inceptions once in the 1980s. And it led to the company’s greatest success: Microsoft Windows. Now I think it’s time for a second inception. Before I get into that, a bit of history. For nearly 25 years now, the story has lingered that Microsoft stole the idea of Windows from Apple while working to develop software for the Lisa and Macintosh operating systems. The stories you hear generally seem to be a mixture of truth, urban legend, and fanboy fabrications at this point — but the fact is that Apple did sue Microsoft in 1988 for copyright infringement on the matter. After four years worth of arguments, Apple lost. They also lost the subsequent appeal (and they even tried to take it to the U.S. Supreme Court, but that was denied). But they didn’t lose because Windows wasn’t thought to be similar to Apple’s operating systems. They lost because the judge ruled that you couldn’t protect the concept of a graphical user interface or the desktop metaphor idea. And more specifically, Apple ran into problems because of a decision that then-CEO John Sculley made in 1985 to sign an agreement licensing certain parts of Apple’s GUI to Bill Gates for use in what would become Windows 1.0 (presumably without realizing exactly what he was doing). Yes, you could make a similar charge against Apple — that they stole several GUI components from Xerox’s PARC labs. (There was a subsequent lawsuit of Apple by Xerox on these grounds, but that was largely seen as a tactical maneuver just in case Apple won the lawsuit against Microsoft.) But the fact is that Microsoft was working closely with Apple as a software partner while they developed the Lisa and Macintosh OSes. Microsoft clearly saw an idea that they liked and they took it for their own and never looked back. A perfect inception. But now that idea is waning. Or rather, everyone is starting to recognize that the idea will be waning in the years to come. Make no mistake, Microsoft still makes a lot of money from Windows — and I do mean a lot. But Windows is not the future. By that I mean that the desktop metaphor GUI is slowly but surely being replaced by a rise of mobile and touchable devices. In other words, Microsoft needs a new idea. The problem is that Microsoft hasn’t proven themselves to be capable of coming up with or executing such an idea on their own. Dozens of failed projects ranging from the original tablet PCs to SPOT watches to the Kin have been left in their wake. The fact that tablet computers are now exploding in popularity thanks to Apple’s iPad suggests that Microsoft, for whatever reason, has a hard time launching new, successful ideas on their own. Windows Mobile is another example of this. They were there early, much earlier than their main rivals. And now they’re getting trounced. Instead, it may be time to piggyback off an idea again. To create a new inception, as it were. Lure someone in, take their idea — and take it to the next level. Microsoft has nothing if not a huge amount of resources. If they pick the right idea to take, they can once again transform the world — but they need that right idea. Truth be told, Microsoft has been practicing this all along to varying degrees. Their two most recent successes, Xbox 360 and Bing, are ideas that Microsoft came late to. Yes, Microsoft had a search engine before Bing, but it was an afterthought. Same with Xbox; they were there far after other players had established the home gaming console field. Though I will concede that the work Microsoft has done with Xbox Live is pretty revolutionary. Of course, that concept is credited as being created outside the main Redmond chamber. Xbox is an interesting area for Microsoft right now. A report just yesterday indicated they may have made as much as a billion dollars in revenue off of Live in the past fiscal year. That’s impressive. But is that really going to be Microsoft’s next great project? Are they going to be a videogame and media portal company? Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but they probably can’t expect to be a company that’s the same size that they are now if that’s going to be their focus. Maybe that next great idea hasn’t shown itself just yet to Microsoft. Or maybe that’s why we’re seeing a complete reboot of the Windows Mobile brand as Windows Phone? Mobile is the obvious choice for that next big idea. Hell, it already is a massively big idea (just ask Apple and Google). But it’s going to get even bigger. And mobile computing in particular is going to get more important to the fabric of society. Microsoft undoubtedly realizes this, and that’s why it’s okay that they’re re-entering the game so late. The big prize is still there for the taking. But unlike with Windows 25 years ago, Microsoft faces one very big challenge this time around if mobile is the next great idea they’re going to pursue: Google. Google’s Android platform is more or less taking the role that Windows took during the PC wars of the 1980s. They’re the more open variety of Apple’s popular but closed idea. They’re the ones going for massive market share while Apple continues to prefer tight controls over its system. Microsoft can’t get away with the licensing fees that they got PC vendors to pay for Windows this time around because the Android software is free. And again, Microsoft is already coming late to the game. So that leaves Microsoft with no clear outlet to make money in mobile since they’d neither be selling hardware nor selling software licenses (again, if they truly hope to compete with Android). What does that leave? Mobile search? Maybe — but again, that’s Google’s game plan and Microsoft is going to have a hard time playing catch up there. The touchscreen tablet computing revolution is also a problematic area as Microsoft’s next idea. Again, there they’ll be facing both Apple and Google. The latter is starting to ramp up Android tablet ideas, and soon, Chrome OS too. Microsoft can offer a full-fledged OS (a flavor of Windows 7) to run on tablets — but will anyone want that? Or will native apps win out? It’s certainly possible that the next idea Microsoft needs hasn’t even been thought of yet. And with Windows and Office continuing to be cash cows, they have some time. But the cash cows are going to start moving towards the pasture soon enough. And where will that leave Microsoft 10 years from now? The idea Microsoft took 25 years ago is already starting to lose some of its luster. The company that got shafted in that maneuver, Apple, has since passed Microsoft in market cap. More importantly, they appear to be on the verge of passing them in quarterly revenues as well (though Microsoft will still undoubtedly have the edge in profits thanks to the huge margins on software). There’s a case to be made that Microsoft can continue to dominate far longer on the enterprise side of things, which are generally slower to move on new computing trends. But at least some folks inside Microsoft don’t believe that Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie cares about enterprise at all. CEO Steve Ballmer undoubtedly does, but he’s always been regarded more as a sales guy than a product visionary. Plus, he’s currently overseeing the entertainment division after their huge recent shakeup. It’s just not clear where Microsoft’s second inception is going to come from. Where that big idea that will steer the company for the next 25 years is going to pop up. The only thing that is certain is that Microsoft needs that second inception. As Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) says at one point in the Inception trailer, “The dream is collapsing.“      
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| Orkut About To Fall To Facebook In India Posted: 07 Jul 2010 11:25 PM PDT For all the grief Google gets for not understanding social networks, people often forget that it owns a pretty big one, Orkut. While Orkut is much smaller than Facebook worldwide, it does dominate in at least two large countries: Brazil and India. But that soon may change. India looks like it is about to fall to Facebook. In May, 2010, Facebook attracted 18 million unique visitors in India, compared to Orkut’s 19.7 million (comScore). In the past year, Facebook grew 177 percent from 6.5 million Indian visitors, compared to 35 percent growth for Orkut. When the June numbers come out, Facebook may very well surpass Orkut in that country. Indeed, Google’s own Trends for websites shows Facebook edging out Orkut in India last month. Facebook has been pouring a lot of resources into India, and is currently hiring 500 people there. It is a major global priority for the company. Brazil, however, is still safe for Orkut, with 29 million visitors a months versus only 8 million for Facebook. But Google is no longer pinning its social networking hopes on Orkut. It has moved onto other things like cloning Facebook with its not-so-secret Google Me project. Well, it might not be a complete clone, if the ideas of one Google researcher are any indication.      
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| Coveroo Raises $2.3 Million For Custom-Engraved Mobile Cases Posted: 07 Jul 2010 09:22 PM PDT Some people like to put tattoos on their body, others like to put Coveroos on their phones. Coveroo puts a custom engraving on the back of your mobile phone or case. The company just closed a Series B funding, led by Rembrandt Venture Partners. Consor Capital and CEO Karl Jacob also put in some money. About 18 months ago, Coveroo rose from the ashes of Wallop, a defunct social networking site where Jacob was also the CEO. Instead of giving up, he pivoted and created a business around personalizing the personal, but largely lookalike, tech we all carry around in our pockets. The company did a reboot with a new $1.5 million Series A in August, 2009. “Some companies do escape the deadpool,” says Jacob. Today, Coveroo offers more than 3,000 designs for all kinds of mobile phones from Androids, Blackberries and iPhone (cases) to Nokias, Motorolas, and Samsungs. You can etch your favorite band, sports team, TV show, movie, or character on the back of your phone, or submit your own design. “We are seeing a real boost in sales of custom phone covers around phones that are quickly and widely distributed. People don't like to have the same phone as everyone else even if it is the new iPhone 4,” notes Jacob. The company also etches phones at live events such as concerts and movie premiers. (We’ve had them at some TechCrunch events, they are always a crowd-pleaser). It is also in trials with a Coveroo kiosk that could be placed at electronics retailers.      
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| Comparison Shopping Site NexTag Acquires Product Review Engine Wize Posted: 07 Jul 2010 08:46 PM PDT
Launched in 2006, Wize lets consumers search for reviews on electronics, home goods, video games, health products and more. It searches shopping sites with user reviews, such as Amazon and BestBuy, as well as expert reviews from traditional product review sites. Wize, which has raised close to $5 million, has aggregated more than six million reviews on over one million products. The startup just revamped the site last fall, tweaking its algorithm and adding additional recommendation features. Wize will continue to maintain its offices, employees and management team in Burlingame, CA. For NexTag, Wize adds additional reviews to its comparison engine. While NexTag already provides user reviews, Wize will now aggregate other reviews into NexTag’s platform. It’s smart of NexTag to continue to enhance its platform because it faces stiff competition from search giants who offer similar engines, such as Bing and Google. NexTag says this acquisition marks to the beginning of the site’s “encompassing acquisitions, global expansion and aggressive recruitment of top talent” to maintain a competitive advantage.      
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| Breaking: Facebook To Enter Into Partnership With Friendster Buyer MOL Global Posted: 07 Jul 2010 07:13 PM PDT
The press conference is being held in Kuala Lumpur and will begin shortly, we’re told. Update: Press release below: MOL and Facebook Bring Facebook Credits to Retail Stores for the First Time MOL Partners with Facebook to Become Payment Provider for Facebook Credits; KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia – July 8, 2010 – MOL Global today announced a strategic partnership with Facebook that will make it significantly easier and more convenient for millions of people across Asia to purchase virtual goods in online games and applications on Facebook. Under the agreement, MOL Global's wholly owned subsidiary MOL AccessPortal will become a payment provider for Facebook Credits. That will enable Facebook members to buy Credits using MOLPoints on Facebook and on MOL's website, MOL.Com. In the coming months, Facebook users will be able to obtain Facebook Credits using MOL points purchased through MOL's network of more than 500,000 outlets, which are mainly in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, India, Australia and New Zealand. In addition to outlets such as 7-Eleven stores and cybercafes, customers will be able to purchase Credits through MOL's network of online banks in these countries. Facebook and MOL will also offer co-branded gift cards at outlets in Malaysia and Singapore that can be redeemed for Facebook Credits. The partnership makes purchasing Facebook Credits significantly more convenient in Asia, a region where consumers rely heavily on offline prepaid cards rather than credit cards to purchase digital goods and services. "The relationship with Facebook demonstrates MOL's growing role as a leading payment provider for social networking sites in Asia, especially in our core countries of Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand and India," said Ganesh Kumar Bangah, group chief executive officer for MOL Global. "Over the last few quarters, we have seen a double-digit increase in payment transactions and payment volume. This partnership continues MOL's momentum to build the largest end-to-end content, distribution and commerce network in Asia." "Working with MOL means we can offer the benefits of Facebook Credits to millions of people in Asia using a payment system that is already widely used and trusted," said Vaughan Smith, director of business and corporate development at Facebook. "We're investing in the long-term future of Facebook Credits and we view this agreement as a major opportunity to broaden the availability of a simple, unified currency that can be used in games and applications across Facebook." Facebook Credits enable users to buy and spend virtual currency in more than 150 applications on Facebook from many leading developers, eliminating the frustration of having to enter payment details separately for each application. Every month, more than 70 percent of Facebook members engage with applications on Facebook Platform. ### About MOL Global MOL is a MSC Malaysia Status Company that operates and develops payment systems incorporated in 2000. MOL handles over 60 million transactions with an annual payment volume of USD200 million. MOL leverages on a network of more than 540,000 physical payment collection points across more than 75 countries. It is also linked online to 88 banks in 9 countries worldwide. MOL was recognized as one of Asia Pacific's fastest growing technology companies in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific Awards in 2005 and 2006, won a Merit Award for the Best of E-Commerce Applications in the MSC Asia Pacific ICT Awards and received the Member Excellence Award at the 2009 ICT Leadership Awards of the National ICT Association of Malaysia. Through its ownership of MOL and Friendster, MOL Global is Asia's largest end-to-end content, distribution and commerce network, pairing MOL's physical payment collection points and payment platform with Friendster's large online footprint, social network and user community in Asia.      
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| TechCrunch TV: Keen On… Connectivity, with Clay Shirky and Charlene Li Posted: 07 Jul 2010 06:06 PM PDT
If the Web 2.0 age of the first decade of the 21st century was about user-generated-content, the Social Media age of the second decade of the century is about the way in which technology is changing our lives. Yesterday's Web 2.0 was all about data; today's social media is all about people. An increasingly collaborative and social Internet appears – at least to those who believe in its efficacy – to be becoming the vehicle with both society and business can be radically transformed. Two important books published last month, Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age and Charlene Li's Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead both make this point eloquently. In his Cognitive Surplus, Shirky – who teaches at New York University and is the author of the 2007 hit Here Comes Everybody – argues that the collapse of a centralized mass media ecosystem frees us up from watching television and allows us to become more creative and generous citizens. Li – the Founder of the Altimeter Group and the coauthor of the 2008 bestselling Groundswell – argues that social media technology is enabling business leaders to make their companies more effective, decisive and thus profitable. So is social media really revolutionizing the world? I invited both Li and Shirky onto the second episode of my show to learn more about these two new books and get each of their visions of about how, exactly, the Internet is radically transforming business, society and culture.      
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| Posted: 07 Jul 2010 04:56 PM PDT The wait is finally over: episode two of TechCrunch TV’s new show OMG/JK is here. What’s that? You have no idea what this nonsensical jumble of letters means? Can’t blame you — we didn’t do a proper introduction last week, though the first thrilling episode is still available in its entirety right here. For those of you who are just joining the party, OMG/JK features TechCrunch writer MG Siegler and myself discussing the latest hot technology news. The show’s title stems from our names (we’re very modest). Of course, MG and I come from different technology camps: he’s a longtime Apple aficionado *cough* fanboy *cough*, and I’ve jumped ship into Google’s open Android arms — and we have differing opinions on plenty of other topics. Let’s just say there’s going to be no shortage of debate. The latest episode covers a range of recent tech news, including the iPhone’s antenna woes, Microsoft’s shortlived Kin, and Foursquare’s latest funding news (as well as a privacy blunder). Let us know your thoughts in the comments.      
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| Posted: 07 Jul 2010 04:21 PM PDT On today’s episode of TechCrunch NOW, investor Jeff Clavier and CloudCrowd founder, Alex Edelstein, joined us to discuss Apple’s ambitious plans for China, BuyWithMe’s new round of funding, and Twitter’s latest product, Earlybird. Aside from Steve Jobs’ world domination plans, we focused on the hyper active daily deal market. Jeff Clavier, who has invested in 81 consumer internet companies as of this Wednesday (he just wrapped up his another investment last week), is no stranger to this space. He recently invested in Townhog— a collective buying site launched in 2009 that also features local promotions. Despite the flood of investment dollars, Clavier says the daily deal market is still in it’s infancy. He predicts that ultimately, personalization will be the key to dominating this sector.
Meanwhile, CloudCrowd’s Edelstein is keeping an eye on Twitter’s Earlybird. Although there’s no clear evidence the new product will directly compete with the likes of Groupon, he says Twitter is a credible threat: “They’re arguably late to the party but they’ve got a lot of huge advantages in this space…I have a Twitter account but I don’t have a Groupon account and if Twitter can establish what locality I live in— which isn’t that hard to do if I think there’s something in it for me— than it’s very easy for them to start messaging deals to me.” For more on Apple, the daily deal market and how competition will affect those rich profit margins, see the video above, or check out previous episodes of TechCrunch Now here.      
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| YouTube ‘Leanback’ Launches, Takes Aim At Your Television Set Posted: 07 Jul 2010 04:07 PM PDT Earlier today YouTube debuted a new mobile experience, using HTML5 to offer a mobile site that sports better video quality and (soon) more content than the native YouTube iPhone application (and it works on other smart phones as well). But they're not done. Tonight, the video portal is also launching YouTube Leanback, a version of YouTube that's optimized for watching content on your TV set, or when you’re sitting a few feet away from your desktop computer. In short, this is YouTube TV. Leanback was first shown off as a preview at Google I/O, and will be integrated into Google TV when it launches this fall. The product evolved from YouTube XL, which launched in June 2009. The XL interface was cleaner than the standard YouTube site and was easier to use from a distance, but it didn't deliver an experience that felt natural to couch surfers. LeanBack changes that. Head to Youtube.com/leanback, and the site will immediately start playing videos from a feed of suggestions, based on other videos you've liked (if you're not logged in it will start playing the videos that are currently most popular on the site). To skip to the next video in the playlist, you hit the right arrow on your keyboard. Want to navigate to a different genre of clips? Hit the down arrow, and you can scroll through other channels of content. Hitting the Up arrow will bring up a search option. In other words, the interface is really straightforward. Hand the keyboard to someone sitting on a couch and they'll probably be able to figure out the basics in a few seconds. And once they've landed on a channel they want, they'll be able to watch an endless stream of content — Leanback will keep playing recommended videos indefinitely, just as a cable channel would. This is all part of YouTube's goal to boost engagement — the site obviously sees a huge volume of uploads and traffic, but it gets around 15 minutes of viewing time a day per user. That contrasts with the five hours of television that people watch on average each day. Of course, there’s the matter of whether people are going to start actually using Leanback — after all, most people aren’t using home theatre PC’s just yet, and Google TV is still a few months off. YouTube’s Julian Frumar, who led design for Leanback, says that the team wants to track how people are using the product so that it can tests its assumptions before the Google TV launch. The team also notes that Leanback isn’t just for TV viewing — the site works perfectly well from your desktop or laptop, and offers a great experience for those times when you just want to watch YouTube clips without making many choices. Rentals aren’t live for Leanback yet, but the YouTube team says that this is due to a technical issue, not a licensing one, and that it hopes to offer rentals in the next few weeks. And yes, ads will eventually make their way into Leanback as well.
     
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| Foursquare Extending The Physical Reach Of Offers And Hints At Hardware Integration Posted: 07 Jul 2010 03:59 PM PDT
First, Foursquare is going to start rotating specials that users see in the “Special Nearby” tab. The service realizes that users are seeing the same ones over and over again in places they frequent, so they’re going to switch that up. Second, Foursquare is going to extend the physical reach of some of these offers. Currently, people within about 200 yards of a venue can see a special. And while that works fine in tightly-packed cities, it can be useless in wide open areas. So they’re going to increase that range in those less dense areas. No word yet on how much they’ll increase the range by, but they say it will be “variable” based on location. Third, Foursquare says it is going to make it more obvious as to why owners of venues will want to designate employees as “Staff” and make them ineligible for deals and mayorship. This is obvious enough, but apparently a lot of venues aren’t doing it and so it’s hard for regular users to get mayorships against people who work there. But the biggest news is buried all the way at the bottom of the post. Foursquare hints that in the future, the service will try to tie-in Foursquare with pieces of hardware to make it more seamless to use. For example, they mention barcode scanners as one possibility. A barcode scanner with Foursquare capabilities could be useful for both users and partners, as it would definitely reduce the friction for using the service, as Foursquare puts it. This type of system would be a bit like the Facebook Presence system that Facebook has been toying with for a while (notably with their keg). This system requires people to carry around a card with an RFID chip (such as on an employee badge) that a scanner can then read and automatically check a person in someplace.      
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| Brand Thunder Rolls Out Personas Interactive Extension For Firefox Posted: 07 Jul 2010 02:50 PM PDT
     
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| Tesla Stock Idling 7 Percent Below IPO Price Posted: 07 Jul 2010 02:49 PM PDT After a better-than-expected pop on the first day of its IPO, Tesla’s stock (under the ticker symbol TSLA) started to slide a few days after. It is now hanging 7 percent below its initial pricing of $17, closing at $15.80 per share today. Only a week on the market, Tesla’s stock has fluctuated greatly, trading at a high of $30.42 and dropping to a low of $14.98. While some hoped Tesla would provide the “Netscape moment” for clean tech IPOs, Tesla seems to have the same struggles other greentech IPOs have experienced. Just last month, commercial rooftop panel maker Solyndra canceled its IPO plans. Greentech companies often face high production costs and initially low profits, a combination that makes some investors skittish. The industry also receives fewer government subsidies than traditional fuel industries like oil, which continues to receive billions in subsidies. One wonders whether Tesla’s IPO roller coaster might worry Zipcar. The company filed for a $75 million IPO of its own in early June. Investors who bought at the IPO, as well as partner Toyota which bought $50 million worth of stock in a private placement at the same time, better have a lot of patience.      
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| Foursquare Is Five Times Larger Than Gowalla And Growing 75 Percent Faster Every Day Posted: 07 Jul 2010 01:50 PM PDT Editor’s note: The following analysis is written by Robert J. Moore, the CEO and co-founder of RJMetrics, an on-demand database analytics and business intelligence startup. Robert blogs at The Metric System and can be followed on Twitter at @RJMetrics. Location-based social networks Foursquare and Gowalla are accumulating users (and headlines) with impressive momentum. While both companies have been vocal about reaching major milestones, we wanted to take a closer look at the data behind these accomplishments. Based on our estimates, Foursquare is not only bigger in terms of both users and venues, but it also is growing at a faster clip than Gowalla. For the past four weeks, we’ve been monitoring the Foursquare and Gowalla APIs to track growth rates, as well as to sample users and venues. This data was loaded into an RJMetrics Dashboard, which provided the results found here with just a few clicks. We will keep these estimates up-to-date with fresh data and you can view them any time at our Startup Data page. Here are a few highlights from our findings:
User GrowthAs of today, Foursquare has just over 1.9 Million users. Gowalla has around 340,000. Over the past 30 days, Foursquare averaged 12,900 new users per day, while Gowall averaged 1,370. Recent new user acquisition by day for each service is shown in the chart below. Foursquare is clearly acquiring users at a much higher rate than Gowalla, and this ratio of new Foursquare users to new Gowalla users is shown below. It averages almost 10-to-1. The numbers become even more interesting when you consider each company’s daily growth rate. This is the number of new users in a given day divided by the total user population from the previous day. Since Foursquare is growing off of a much larger base, you might expect their percentage growth to be smaller than Gowalla’s. However, as shown below, their daily growth rate averages about 75% higher than Gowalla’s. Venue GrowthSimilar trends appear when we look at daily venue growth. Currently, Foursquare has about 5.6 Million venues (or about 3 per user) and Gowalla has 1.4 Million venues (or around 4 per user). The rate at which new venues are being added is shown below: User CharacteristicsFoursquare and Gowalla share different information about their users via their respective public APIs, revealing different types of statistics about each population. On Foursquare:
On Gowalla:
Interestingly, across both services, the five most popular first names are identical:
Venue CharacteristicsAs with users, the available data differs between the two services. On Foursquare:
On Gowalla:
Across both services, the most popular venue names are:
How We Did ItIn most cases, this level of detail wouldn’t be accessible from the outside looking in. However, Foursquare and Gowalla have a few common characteristics that made it possible:
Our scripts tracked the maximum registered user and venue IDs each hour, along with randomly sampling data points throughout the population. This gave us a “density factor” so that we could adjust the absolute numbers to reflect deactivated accounts, deleted venues, and other skipped IDs. In the end, our sample size consisted of about 82,000 data points from Foursquare and 36,000 data points from Gowalla. As with all such analyses, the results in this report are only estimates and could be skewed by flaws in our sampling methods or unconsidered outside factors. ConclusionBoth services are showing impressive growth and are accumulating moutains of valuable, fascinating data. However, Foursquare is clearly the dominant player and their lead is increasing every day. Be sure to keep an eye on our Startup Data page to track how these numbers progress over time. With Foursquare approaching the 2 Million member mark, it appears that this may only be the beginning.      
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| With Interest At A Frenzy, Bing Attaches Itself To LeBron’s Hip Posted: 07 Jul 2010 01:42 PM PDT
Tomorrow night, millions of people around this country (and likely the world) are going to be tuning into ESPN to watch the NBA star announce his decision about where he’ll be playing basketball for the next several years. ESPN has created a special program for the event which they’re calling “The Decision” and they’re promoting the hell out of it. Microsoft Bing will be sponsoring that show and more importantly, likely donating millions to the Boys and Girls club charity — a stipulation James’ camp wanted for the event. And that’s not all Bing is doing with LeBron. As you can clearly see on lebronjames.com right now, Bing is prominently displayed as the search engine on the site. That couldn’t have come cheap for Microsoft as millions of fans are hitting the site daily trying to get the latest word about where James will go. Bing is obviously touting both deals today. “We are excited to be a part of LeBron's important day and to be the official decision engine of the site LebronJames.com and one of the presenting sponsors of ‘The Decision’ program,” Lisa Gurry, Bing’s Director, writes on the Bing community blog today. She goes on to note Microsoft’s long-standing relationship with James — yadda, yadda. The bottom line is that this is a smart move by Microsoft to get some key prime time exposure for their search engine among a key demographic.      
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| Twitter + Vuvuzela. What More Do You Need? Posted: 07 Jul 2010 01:15 PM PDT Twitter has been having a bit of difficulty remaining stable during the World Cup. But in some ways, it’s a nice problem to have — they’re seeing higher usage levels than they ever have. To some users though, the combination is extremely annoying. Anytime a team scores a goal, tweet streams become a solid chunk of “GOAAAAAALLLL” “#ESP GOOOOOOALLLLL”, etc. But it could be worse: at least Twitter doesn’t have vuvuzelas. Or does it? Yes, there’s an account devoted to the annoyingly monotone musical instrument that’s all the rage right now in soccer stadiums across South Africa. It’s clearly the World Cup account to follow right now on Twitter if you’re stuck at your desk but want to get a feel for what it’s like to be watching the game in realtime. It’s not quite as annoying as YouTube’s vuvuzela button. But with all the retweets, it’s close. Over 10,000 people are following this account. Brilliant.      
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| YouTube Mobile Goes HTML5, Video Quality Beats Native Apps Hands Down Posted: 07 Jul 2010 01:01 PM PDT
Of course, YouTube already has a mobile application with massive install base — every iOS device, all 100 million of them, came with a native YouTube application. But during a presentation at YouTube's headquarters today, product manager Andrey Doronichev made it clear that the new web-based application is superior in just about every way, and it wasn't hard to detect some tension between YouTube and Apple. This underscores a bigger trend, as Google shifts toward favoring web applications over native apps whenever it can. You see, YouTube doesn't actually control the native app that ships with the iPhone — that's all Apple, though YouTube obviously collaborates with them when asked to. And it's clear that the Apple team hasn't done such a great job keeping up with YouTube's latest improvements. In one particularly telling demo, Doronichev pulled out two iPhones and pitted the native YouTube application against the new m.YouTube.com. The web app offered a number of advantages, including auto-complete in search and a UI that's more consistent with the latest version of the YouTube webpage (the iPhone app still uses YouTube's 5-star rating system, which was abandoned in January in favor of a binary 'Like' system). Most important, the video quality of the web application was leaps and bounds ahead of the iPhone app — Doronichev explained that this was because the iPhone app still uses a video streaming format that was developed for Edge, not 3G. Video on the HTML5 app looked much better, and was snappier to boot. The web application also comes with a few other differences. Doronichev says that it gives YouTube more flexibility when it comes to rapid iteration, and it also opens the door to a broader array of mobile ads. This is important — Doronichev says it means that the web app will eventually have access to more content than the native applications, because content owners will have more advertising options. There's still one big problem facing the web application, though, and that's increasing user awareness. YouTube says that the number of video views streamed to mobile devices has increased by 160% over the last year, and that YouTube is now seeing 100 million mobile views per day (that's as many as the YouTube website had when it was acquired by Google in 2006). My hunch is that a lot of those views are coming from native applications, especially those on iPhones and iPod Touch. And to those users, the YouTube experience is the native application their phones came with, not the mobile browser site. Doronichev says that users may start using the web app more as it continues to improve over its native counterparts (especially as it takes the lead in terms of content available), but I suspect it will take a major education and promotional campaign to drive a big shift in the way users access YouTube. Update: Well, this is interesting. If you’re on an iPhone and you browse to the YouTube mobile site, it will prompt you to “install” it on your iPhone (it adds a link to your iPhone’s home screen). Looks like Google isn’t wasting any time in getting people to switch. One other thing to note: once you’ve “installed” the web app, the logo shown on the iPhone home screen is actually the YouTube logo, whereas the native iPhone application is an image of an outdated TV. I suspect users will be more attracted to the former. One caveat: Doronichev says that there are still some bugs with the web app on the iPhone 4, which will be cleaned up in the next few weeks.      
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| Location Data Gets An Important New Layer: The Alcohol Layer Posted: 07 Jul 2010 12:48 PM PDT
Humorously, the app was built by Skyhook Wireless, the service that’s one of the largest providers of geolocation data in the world. They’re smart. They know that most end users couldn’t care less about this data, they just want fun apps that utilize it. And that’s exactly what iSwig is. The iPhone app is simple. You load it up and pick out the drink you happen to be enjoying. There are thousands of drinks in the database, from vague (bourbon) to specific (Redheaded Slut). Drinks are broken up into five categories: Liquor, Mixed, Shot, Beer, and Wine. Once you pick the drink you have, the next page locates you on a map, and asks if you’d like to tie yourself (or more specifically, your drink) to a venue. These venues come from both Skyhook’s data and Foursquare’s venue data. You can then leave a comment if you wish, choose to post it to Facebook and/or Twitter, and you’re set. The app doesn’t even require that you sign-in (or have an account) to use it. You can choose to use a nickname or not. But if you want to, you can also hook it up to Facebook via Connect or to Twitter. You can also hook it up to the aforementioned Foursquare so that you can check-in when you’re drinking. And you can hook it up to Flickr as well for any photos you take of the drink. All of this optional integration is actually quite impressive. A Home stream allows you to see all the activity by other users on iSwig. But you can also narrow it down to see just what people around you are drinking. And you can easily alter time to see all the way back to the last year of drinks around you, or “just now.” Plus, you can see what the top drinks are at any given time. This works on a global level, and all the way down to a 5 mile radius of where you currently are (it’s a sliding scale). For example, globally, Dewar’s is the drink of choice this past month, followed by Absolut and margaritas. You can also see data broken down by individual drinks. For example, you can see a timeline of all those drinking whiskey recently. And you can see a leader board of the top drinkers of each drink. Awesome. And you can add any drink to your “faves.” Again, all of this is just a way to showcase some of Skyhook’s huge amount of data (as well as get them another layer — the alcohol layer). And it’s meant to show just how easy it is to build an app on top of their data. But it’s an ingenious way. Skyhook says it took them just a couple of days to build this with their Local Faves social location SDK. I’ve complained before about check-in fatigue — that there are simply too many location-based apps out there right now. Unfortunately, that usually stops me from using most of them regularly. But iSwig is one I’m definitely going to be using. If nothing else, it will help me remember where I was and what I was drinking last night. You can find iSwig in the App Store here. It’s a free download.
     
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I’m not gonna lie — most of the venues I check-in to on apps like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Loopt are bars. Most of the time I’m not there to have dinner either. Instead, I’m there to enjoy an adult beverage. Or three. So why not cut out the middlemen, and instead use a location-based app that flips the equation and focuses on the drinks themselves? That’s exactly what iSwig is. It’s perfect.
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